About Me

Blog Archive

Search This Blog

Monday, October 02, 2017

`To Trim a Whole Dress, in Fact'

Gimp means cripple.
Not flattering and probably hurtful to some, though a friend with multiple
sclerosis who died fifteen years ago cheerfully called himself a gimp, and mock-complained that his legs,
almost worthless by the time I knew him, were gimpy. Then I read Chekhov’s “Polinka,” a story written in 1887,
making it late-early or early-middle Chekhov. He was twenty-seven. The
translation is Constance Garnett’s (The
Darling and Other Stories, 1917).

The title
character is a dressmaker shopping for fabric and waited on by Nikolay
Timofeitch, a “graceful, dark young man” in love with Polinka, who is in love,
of course, with another. This little story is an exercise in maintaining appearances,
a “romcom” of indirection. Talk of fabric is interleaved with references to the
never-named boyfriend, a student. Nikolay, a clerk, is intimidated by the
social rank of the student, and warns Polinka he’s only after her dowry. By the
end of the story, Polinka is weeping, though Chekhov never tells us why. Does
she love Nikolay? Is she encouraging the student solely for the sake of social status?
The story ends with Nikolay, seeing Polinka’s tears “still gushing,” listing various
sorts of lace: “`Spanish, Rococo, soutache, Cambray . . . stockings thread,
cotton, silk . . .”

Back to gimp. Early in the story, Polinka asks
to see some. “For what purpose?” Nikolay asks, and she replies: “`For a bodice
trimming—to trim a whole dress, in fact.’” “Nikolay Timofeitch lays several
kinds of gimp before Polinka; she looks at the trimmings languidly and begins
bargaining over them.”

So, gimp is material but what sort and how
does it relate to the word’s more common meaning? The OED offers seven usages. Four simple letters have evolved
exponentially over the centuries. Here is the definition as the word is used by
Garnett: “Silk, worsted, or cotton twist with a cord or wire running through
it. Now chiefly applied to a kind of trimming made of this . . . sometimes
covered with beads or spangles.” The etymology is identified as our old friend “of
obscure origin,” though possible Dutch and German roots are suggested.

The fourth
definition is the one I’ve always known: “a lame person, a cripple; a lame leg;
a limp. Also as v., to limp, hobble.”
Again “origin uncertain; perhaps a corruption of gammy.” That’s a word I vaguely remembered. Graham Greene used it
in Brighton Rock: “One leg was gammy,
he moved it with a mechanism worked from his pocket.” It’s English, whereas gimp is American. The two senses of gimp seem entirely unrelated. Our
language, once again, is unapologetically profligate.

1 comment:

Sure, the “wire running through” the material, and the “mechanism worked from [the] pocket” recall to me an essay by the great Manny Farber, in 1952:

« Somebody once told me, no doubt inaccurately, that lady golfers in the Victorian era used a certain gimmick that went by the name of “Gimp.” It was a cord running from hem of skirt to waistband; when preparing to hit the ball, you flicked it with your little finger and up came the hem. Thus suddenly, for a brief instant, it revealed Kro-Flite, high-button shoes, and greensward, but left everything else carefully concealed behind yards of eyeleted cambric. Something like this device has now been developed in Hollywood. Whenever the modern film-maker feels that his movie has taken too conventional a direction and is neglecting “art,” he need only jerk the Gimp-string, and behold!—curious and exotic but “psychic” images are flashed before the audience, pepping things up at the crucial moment, making you think such thoughts as “The hero has a mother complex,” or “He slapped that girl out of ambivalent rage at his father image which he says he carries around in his stomach,” or “He chomps angrily on unlit cigarettes to show he comes from a Puritan environment and has a will of iron.” »